Saturday, February 23, 2002

"Our eye finds it more comfortable to respond to a given stimulus by reproducing once more an image that it has produced many times before, instead of registering what is different and new in an impression." - Friedrich Nietzsche, cited in Crary, Techniques of the Observer. Deja vu as an optic spasm. But better yet, here's Crary on Turner, whose work's in Baltimore. "In Turner, all of the mediations that previously had distanced and protected an observer from the brilliance of the sun are cast off. The exemplary figures of Kepler and Newton employed the camera obscura precisely to avoid looking directly into the sun while seeking to gain knowledge of it or the light it propagated. Turner's direct confrontation with the sun, however, dissolves the very possibility of representation that the camera obscura was meant to ensure. His solar preoccupations were 'visionary' in that he made central in his work the retinal processes of vision...in one of Turner's great later paintings, the 1843 'Light and Color (Goethe's theory) The Morning After the Deluge,'...the view of the sun that had dominated so many of Turner's previous images now becomes a fusion of eye and sun...(the shape of the painting) corresponds with the pupil of the eye and the retinal field on which the temporal experience of an afterimage unfolds." Judge for yourself. 8:07:59 PM

http://www.fivethings.com/ is a site which chronicles the ideas and random inspirations of a group of folks in the struggling-to-be-born D.C. contemporary art scene. Mixing images of the contributor's work with scattered compelling visuals with links with random references to works-in-progress, It's got the feel of an archive that someone will tap into sometime in the distant future to try and figure out how such a scene developed (or crashed and burned) in D.C. in the early 21st century. One of the sometimes contributors is the woman who launched Fusebox (www.Fuseboxdc.com), essentially the first tied-into-the-art-world contemporary gallery in the city (they decribe themselves as "the premier exhibition space for emergent art). Fusebox has been amazingly successfully considering that it opened on the heels of Sept. 11. Fusebox [~] a for-profit gallery space which is selling work at an impressive clip [~] seems to be so beloved by both artists and patron's that they've acquired the aura of a nonprofit arts association. 10:02:40 AM

© Copyright 2002 Lisa Lynch.